Best Practices

Don’t assume your users will perform perfectly. Assume they will get tired, busy, distracted, hurried, and interrupted and will make mistakes. Then design your products accordingly. Read full article ...

It’s much better to have an incomplete bug report in the system than to have a bug reporting system with an incomplete list of the known problems. By training your team to report bugs immediately, you can reduce risk for your product and company. Read full article ...

When doing product or project management, pay special attention to big potential risks that are causing no symptoms today. It is these risks that you’re most likely to underinvest in addressing and therefore these risks that are most likely to cause big problems in the future. Read full article ...

One lesson from Fukushima is already clear: when all of your failover systems can fail simultaneously due to the same cause, you don’t have redundancy. You have a single point of failure with multiple moving parts. Read full article ...

If you’re a product manager or product marketing manager in the San Francisco Bay Are, don’t miss Silicon Valley Product Camp 2011 on April 2nd in San Jose. It’s FREE, so register now before it fills up! Read full article ...

Beware product designs in which a user can select many objects and do destructive data operations. Want to have a really bad day at the office? Apply an operation to the currently-selected list of objects … whatever that list might be! Read full article ...

To reduce the risk of biasing yourself (and others), avoid stating a position on an issue before you have to. Start by asking questions with an open mind, learning, and hearing what others have to say. Read full article ...